Monday, March 30, 2009

Bertolt Brecht noted that we live at a time when it seems a crime to talk about a tree. Since then, things have become much worse. Today it seems a crime merely to talk about change while one's society is transformed into an institution of absolute violence /// is not the sheer power of this brutality immune against the spoken and written word which indicts it? And is not the word which is directed against the practitioners of this power the same they use to defend their power? There is a level on which even the unintelligent action against them seems justified. For action smashes, though only for a moment, the closed universe of suppression - Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt

Thursday, March 26, 2009

The Gypsies rightly contend that one is never obliged to speak the truth except in one’s own language; in the enemy’s language the lie must reign.

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It is true that I have tasted pleasures little known to people who have obeyed the lamentable laws of this era. It is also true that I have strictly observed several duties of which they have not the slightest idea. ‘For you see only the external husk of our life’, The Rule of the Templars stated bluntly in its time, ‘but you do not know the severe commandments within’.

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Their preoccupation with objectivity constitutes the legitimate excuse for their failure to act. But this classic attitude of the intellectuals and the leaders of political parties is by no means objective.

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The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as "things". Imagination (Image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, any use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image's use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.

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The Spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.

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Let us therefore, in company with the owner of money and the owner of labour-power, leave this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone, and follow them into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there hangs the notice ‘No admittance except on business’. Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is itself produced. The secret of profit-making must at last be laid bare.

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and you will know this only afteryou have been landed on the top floorto set the fire, then you will havefor the first time concernabout your fingerprintsand how you will get down out of thereand that the corruption is true,organized and distributedthroughout the system

you set fire to the City, burn the Citydown

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If the serious saboteurshad succeeded / who could sayWe would not have a deeper sense of reality& self

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’But we have got an idea about this that’s radically different from yours and we can state it’ . . . . What makes it amazing is that it’s hidden, and suddenly revealed. The trip to the moon doesn’t possess this quality because it’s not hidden, and it’s not suddenly revealed . . . the point I want to make is about the call of the creative imagination to do this anyway, and make certain discoveries directly because of its energy, as a result of going out of its energy of the imagination; “to image” a place that you’ve never seen . . .

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In answer to the lie of the colonial situation, the colonized subject responds with a lie.

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The violence which governed the ordering of the colonial world, which tirelessly punctuated the destruction of the indigenous social fabric, and demolished unchecked the systems of reference of the country’s economy, lifestyles, and modes of dress, the same violence will be vindicated and appropriated when, taking history into their own hands, the colonized swarm into the forbidden cities.

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. . . . we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.

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Only the firing squads still know what to do.

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I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado.

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This is how the dispossessed organized their speech by weaving it into the apparantly meaningless texture of extreme noise.

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Simple anticommunication, borrowed today from dadaism by the most reactionary champions of the established lies, is worthless in an era when the urgent question is to create a new communication on all levels of practice, from the most simple to the most complex. Dadaism’s most worthy sequel, its legitimate heir, must be recognized in the Congo during the summer of 1960. The spontaneous revolt of a people . . . . knows how to immediately appropriate the foreign language of the masters as poetry and as a form of action. We should respectfully study the expression of the Congolese during this period in order to recognize in it the greatness and effectiveness (cf. the role of the poet Lumumba) of the only possible communication that, in all cases, accompanies intervention in events and the transformation of the world.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

61 wide-eyed numbersfalling out of the skysign em, they are yourefforts to find workhelp em, they are deafbut lawful, tumblingfrom the slats of the skycrows, not cuckoos, crowslepers, evidence, carsbright magnetic whistlingthis is your jobsearch- friends -here is the village you orderedwe burned its houses down

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Sunday, March 08, 2009

Thanks to everyone who turned out for Paul's fundraiser Thursday nite // lots of fun, lots of great poetry & music, a bookstall kindly provided by Mr Alan Halsey and others //we raised quite a lot of cash, which Paul promises to spend on his 'research' // yeh // & there's a whole bunch of photos from the nite over here

was given a few presents // Jeff Hilson's new Bird Bird, finally available from Landfill Press, is a very beautiful thing // & a couple of mags, Klatch (available I think from the Openned Site) and the new Axolotl, which can be had from Luke Roberts, who lives in axolotlmagazine (at) gmail (dot) com // both of these are great, goodlooking lo-fi staple in tha corner things // you know, stuff the Blairite corporate business-school-of-poetry tendency would never understand // haha // but if you wanna know whats REALLY going on in, ahem, 'british' 'poetry' then these are the things you'll wanna get // engines! scales! antennae! //

As many of you know, Paul spent the Xmas period banged up in Belmarsh Maximum Security Prison. We thought we’d raise him some cash to make up for his dismal ordeal! There’ll also be a bookstall the proceeds of which will go to Paul. Please bring anything you want to sell!